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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25519000">waiting for the day</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated'>focusfixated</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5 Times, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, M/M, Memory Loss, but make it gay, cosmological predestination</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:48:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,387</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25519000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/focusfixated/pseuds/focusfixated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Richie doesn’t put much stock in the notion of a great cosmic tapestry that contains every predetermined pattern across the span of all time. He believes only in random bullshit, bad luck, and his own sorry excuses for not taking control.</p><p>And yet. </p><p>(or: four times Richie and Eddie met over the years and didn't remember, and one time they did.)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>159</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>waiting for the day</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/koritsimou/gifts">koritsimou</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>okay, several things. this is a gift-fic to my very dear <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/koritsimou/pseuds/koritsimou">koritsimou</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/koritsisou">@koritsisou</a> on twitter, check out her <a href="https://twitter.com/PPDCLosers/status/1249789353871769607">pacific rim reddie sm:au</a>!) who was the one who dragged me into this fandom in the first place by live-messaging me it-movie thoughts thirteen timezones away while i was on a five-hour bus ride and hadn't even watched the film.</p><p>second, this is meant to be a birthday gift full of love and romance and tenderness, but this is richie we're talking about, so please note <b>CONTENT WARNINGS</b> for: brief infidelity, intrusive thoughts, and passing references (and a dismissive attitude) to self-harm, suicidal ideation, and alcoholism. </p><p>third! this was inspired by <a href="https://vulcains.tumblr.com/post/189731308530/based-on-this-cover-of-the-new-yorker-i-love">this beautiful piece of art</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/vulcains_">@vulcains</a>, and listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB3utoCRRAk">i'm waiting for the day</a> by the beach boys.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>--- ONE ---</em>
</p><p> </p><p>They see each other for the first time in New York, through the finger-smeared windows of separate trains on opposite sides of the track, one heading westbound, the other east.</p><p>Richie has earbuds in, brainwaves surfing the pleasant harmonies of The Beach Boys. His fingers are slipped between the pages of a trash horror novel he picked up at the airport on his way out of LA, which he’s long since stopped reading. He can’t remember the title right now; something broadly menacing in its vagueness; <em>The Empty Bedroom, </em>or <em>The Haunted Carnival </em>or <em>The Mysterious Bridge</em>, something like that.</p><p>He’s humming under his breath, foot tapping, waiting. On the other side of the tracks, the eastbound train loiters. Richie’s window looks out onto its scarred, scratch-mottled exterior; there’s grey-pink gum drying in the wedge of a window, and he can see the people over there, their shopping bags, the phones in their hands, the back covers of their books.</p><p>He leans closer. One of the books looks familiar; a red cover, with a stamp of white block-capitals spelling out the title. <em>The Attic Room, </em>Richie remembers all at once, with a spike of clarity that almost hurts, leaving him dizzy and light-headed. And then the train lurches, creaking out of the station, and for a brief, suspended moment, the windows of the train line up, and Richie sees him.</p><p>He’s in a suit, a non-specific dark colour that could be navy, charcoal, but just looks kind of black as it absorbs the yellow-white fluorescence of underground lighting. His tie is done up to the top, hair combed back all neat, but his cheeks are flushed red, high up in a stain over his ghost-pale face. Their eyes meet, and Richie feels it like a sucker-punch, like the unnaturally bright lights of the carriage have flared up, supernovaed, burned everything out in his brain to a colourless blank, and in the ringing silence he has the strange, distant thought that <em>he swears he knows</em>—</p><p>And then the trains pass each other by, and the man is gone. Breathing deep, Richie puts a hand to his chest, where it feels like a fishhook lodged itself between his ribs, an invisible line tugging at him, leading out to somewhere.</p><p><em>I’m waiting for the day when you can love again</em>, Brian Wilson sings in Richie’s ear.</p><p>Richie's hand shakes as he skips the track. He leaves the book on the seat beside him as he exits the train, and later doesn’t remember that he did.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>--- TWO ---</em>
</p><p> </p><p>The second time they meet, Richie’s in New York again. He’s kind of sick of making the journey out here, but his manager’s convinced him to attend a writer’s workshop for a new comedy series, ignoring all of Richie’s pleas that he hasn’t written anything, funny or otherwise, in about eighteen years and instead bluntly telling Richie that the way things were going, his tired-out routine would fall so far out of favor that he wouldn’t have a career in the next two, and it might be time to get his face off the stage and inside a writer’s room instead.</p><p>Richie stops for a coffee as he exits the subway, half an hour early for his meeting. The chalkboard outside the shop has a witty comment of up-to-the-minute relevance on it that means absolutely nothing to Richie, so he must be at least two trending topics on Twitter behind between his flight landing last night and waking up this morning. Inside the shop, it’s all macramé plant-holders and dreampop indie and a weirdly high concentration of attractive baristas. Daringly, since he’s already feeling sickeningly anxious and a bit extra’s hardly going to break the dam, Richie lets himself give the guy who makes his coffee a little eye contact along with his tip.</p><p>He’s still got a few minutes before he has to head off, so he hops up onto one of the bar-style stools by the table-ledge at the window, under the hanging baskets of spider-plants and the vintage buckets of tradescantia that dangle waxily over his head. He’s just starting to feel like he might calm down, after a couple of gulps of coffee, might even walk into this meeting with his head held high saying <em>thank you for the opportunity</em> instead of slouching in with a posture that says <em>sorry,</em> <em>I know no-one wants me here</em>, when his attention is caught by a magazine on the table in front of him.</p><p>Richie pulls it towards himself, spinning it round to take a closer look, drawn in by a strange, preemptive freefall of a feeling. And it's <em>her</em> on the cover, looking back at him, green eyes sharper than usual in photographic contrast, red hair in an undulating fall of model-perfect waves. He sees the slope of her straight nose, the crook of her secretive smile, and the slight soft indent of her chin that he knows has been smoothed out in Photoshop, because it should be deeper than that – and how the fuck does he know that?</p><p>At the edge of his vision, a man walks into sight. “Hey, sorry, that’s mine, do you mind if I—” He puts a hand on the magazine and their fingers touch.</p><p>Out of fucking nowhere, Richie feels it; a tug, deep in his chest, intercostal muscles cramping sharply, like a knife’s come in and slit him between the ribs. It’s alarming, and Richie freezes, heart beating, pressing one hand to his lower ribs, dizzy with pain and somehow expecting to feel sudden, wet warmth seeping into his palm. His other hand, in a panic, instinctive, grabs onto the guy’s arm, fingers digging into the neat-pressed cut of a fine suit.</p><p>The guy’s staring at him, and he looks about as shaken as Richie feels, looking between Richie’s hand on his arm, and the one on the magazine cover, face drained and pale under a slick of rigidly-gelled hair. He looks terrified, and he’s tugging his arm, trying to get Richie, who just latched onto him like a manic limpet, off of him.</p><p>“This is not my usual pick-up line,” Richie says, weakly. “But did you feel it too?”</p><p>“Feel what?” The guy’s eyes are like weird hollow tunnels of anxiousness under a thick, furrowed brow, like a rabbit in headlights that’s been snared too many times. “Look, man, I’ve got to get to work.”</p><p>Richie feels a bead of sweat trickle coolly down the back of his neck, and he peels his grip off the guy’s arm. The trembling aftershocks, whatever they were, have faded, and Richie feels whatever just got blown-up and knocked-over inside his chest re-stabilise, and it’s like nothing happened at all. “Sorry yeah – I have no idea what – uh. Have a great day, I guess,” he finishes, embarrassed.</p><p>“You too,” the man says stiffly, politely, and the pallor in his cheeks has smudged into a reddening blush which Richie catches sight of and for a split-second thinks, nonsensically, delightedly, <em>I did that</em>, before the guy turns tail and walks out of the door.</p><p>Richie stares, for a moment, lost in thought, feeling like he was in the middle of something really important, but it fades out like a retreating wave, leaving nothing but bleached-out sand underneath. And then his phone buzzes.</p><p><em>get your ass to this meeting i swear to god tozier </em>– is all he reads, eyes skimming over the text, before he remembers with a jolt he’s got to be somewhere, and now he’s fucking late.</p><p>He scrambles up and tumbles out of the shop in a billow of coffee grounds and steam. A gentle morning breeze picks up through the open door in his wake, and a gust ruffles the cornered pages of the forgotten magazine.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>--- THREE ---</em>
</p><p> </p><p>The third time, Richie has just landed in Pittsburgh for show number three of his fourteen-date east-coast tour. It’s pouring with rain on his way to the hotel, and he gets out of the cab a block too early, so by the time he walks through the door of his room, he’s soaked through, peeling off all his wet clothes in disgust, his skin cold and rubbery. He collapses on the bed and switches on the TV.</p><p>He stares blankly at the last ten minutes of a documentary about the cosmos, then sits back up, and thinks about how much he wants a drink. There’s not much sadder than drinking alone at a hotel bar, but it’s either that or make the trip back out into the rain to grab something that’s drinkable neat and straight out of the bottle and pairs well with jetlag and self-pity. At least getting into the hotel bar requires him to be fully dressed and presentable, and he can kid himself he’s something more put-together than an ageing alcoholic alone in his underwear and one wet sock.</p><p>There’s still plenty of room for self-pity at the bar, but at least he’s got pants on.</p><p>When he gets down there, he sees the back of the guy’s head first, a solo figure amongst a handful of pairs and threes, women sipping nondescript cocktails in the inoffensively chic lounge, suited men with one button undone under their plain-silk ties, a concession to the late hour. The guy isn’t wearing a jacket, and is leaning forward against the bar. His shirt pulls tight across his back and Richie is suddenly struck with the compelling urge to take a running leap and jump onto him with his hands dug right into the sinew of those sloping shoulders. It passes, brief and insane, and Richie bites back the tail-end of the feeling, used to unbidden thoughts letting themselves into his brain uninvited – <em>what if I dropped my phone off this bridge, what if I asked him to fuck me, what if I walked into traffic, what if told him I loved him—</em></p><p>And then the man turns around. He’s frowning, suspicious, like he knew Richie was there, and when their eyes meet, Richie’s hit by staggering déja-vu – like he’s reliving a hundred memories, all at once, moving so fast they burn white-hot and then slip away like something viscous and unholdable, out of his hands and mind. It’s gone as fast as it came.</p><p>Undeterred, Richie says, “This seat taken?” and drops a casual hand on the barstool near the other guy. The man shakes his head, but he’s frowning, eyes flickering up and down over Richie in fidgety little pulses, like he’s experiencing REM while wide awake. And then, for no reason, which is the reason he does almost everything, Richie leans over, hand out, and says, “Richie Tozier.”</p><p>“Eddie Kaspbrak.” The guy shakes, then pulls back with a sudden, surprised expression. “Sorry, have we met?”</p><p>“Don’t think so,” Richie says, which is what he tends to say now instead of <em>maybe you’ve seen me on TV</em>, because his desire for some normal fucking conversation not knocked askew by weird fame-fuelled power dynamics far, <em>far</em> outweighs his pathetic urge to be recognised and validated by strangers. “Unless it was like, earlier in the lobby. Do you come here often?” His grin is wide and cheesy.</p><p>Eddie’s eyes are fixed on Richie again, hand tensed around a near-empty glass. His mouth is slightly agape, and Richie can see where his lips are shiny-wet and worried by his teeth. Unbidden and vivid, Richie imagines sucking the swell of that bottom lip into his own mouth, sees the image with startling clarity, imagines the sound that Eddie makes, open and needy, hearing it like it’s playing out loud.</p><p>Richie doesn’t put much stock in the notion of a great cosmic tapestry that contains every predetermined pattern across the span of all time, with his own frayed thread of a life tangled in the design somehow. Richie believes only in random bullshit, bad luck, and his own sorry excuses for not taking control. And yet.</p><p>“I don’t usually do this.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Richie says, half an hour later, toeing his suitcase further under the bed and shrugging off his jacket as he lets himself into his hotel room, Eddie following behind. “Me neither.”</p><p>He’s feeling hot and anticipatory, his skin alight and his stomach tight, a liquid heat in his spine that pulses along with the high-kick of his heart in his chest.</p><p>“I mean,” Eddie says, “I have literally never done this before.”</p><p>Richie pauses. “Never?”</p><p>“No, what the fuck, I’ve been married fifteen years. To a woman. I haven’t slept around. I’m not like that.” He looks agonised, tugging on his tie to loosen it, and Richie feels bad for him, he does, but he also just wants him, senselessly.</p><p>Richie takes his tie the rest of the way off for him. Eddie looks on, helpless, like maybe he still wants to protest, but has settled for watching it all happen to him instead. Richie is struck with the need to make Eddie <em>do </em>something, get him to react somehow, so he puts his mouth on Eddie’s neck. He feels Eddie’s pulse jump under the wet press of his tongue, a blood-salt warmth he can almost taste.</p><p>Eddie is holding still beneath him, coiled and heated, breath rapid and shallow in Richie’s ear. He’s not moving, arms stiff by his side, so Richie does him a favor and moves Eddie’s hands for him, guiding them up and under his t-shirt.</p><p>They move into each other, sliding into place, and Richie’s thigh presses up between Eddie’s legs, and Eddie’s hands move tremblingly over Richie’s back, fingertips digging in and releasing, hesitation marks across his skin.  </p><p>They fall onto the bed, and Richie has Eddie underneath him, kissing him with a thirst or a hunger or a desire he can’t remember ever feeling before, licking into the crook of Eddie’s mouth, tongue running over the pristine edge of his teeth. As he does, Eddie shakes and moans, and he’s still mostly dressed but he’s grinding against Richie’s leg with an erratic, jerking desperation like he’s close already, and Richie’s mind turns to a blind fog at the feeling of Eddie pressing up against him.</p><p>“Eddie,” he says, trembling, wondering why the fuck there’s so much tenderness spilling out of the sound of his voice to a stranger, a nobody, but then Eddie freezes, and pulls back.</p><p>“I – sorry,” he says, and his big eyes are blown-wide beneath the deep furrow of his brow. He scrambles back, and Richie feels the loss of him like a chest excavation. “I can’t do this,” Eddie says, and then he’s standing up, wincing. “It’s fucking weird, but you – remind me too much of someone. I can’t place it. Sorry. It’s freaking me out.”</p><p>“Maybe you’ve seen me on TV,” Richie says, lamely, but Eddie is already picking up his jacket and his kicked-off shoes and backing apologetically out of the room.</p><p>“I’ve got to— big client meeting tomorrow – I can’t – I—”</p><p>The door shuts behind him.</p><p>Richie turns over and shoves his face in a pillow and feels, insanely, like his heart is breaking.</p><p>Later, he jerks off, comes fast and sad into a wad of tissues, and then drifts into a spent, exhausted sleep, wondering dimly if there was something important he was supposed to remember, and whether or not he should have written it down.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>---FOUR---</em>
</p><p> </p><p>The fourth time, they’re all walking into the Jade of the Orient and Richie is already in the middle of a crisis; a very slow, long crisis that has been dragged out like roadkill caught in the wheels of a car for two days and three thousand miles. And that crisis has been splintering out every few minutes into a jagged network of other, smaller crises, prickling like little needlepoints across his neurons, capillaries, skincells, every part of him brimming and bristling with something strange and spiky. They’re not memories, exactly, just flashes of a face, a word, a thought, a half-chewed concept, and he’s amped and shaking and sick and swigging from a hipflask like a detective in a 70s cop show before he even sees him again.</p><p>And then he does see him. The severity of his jawline and that dark slash of anxious brows. His compact shoulders hunched tight inside a sports jacket – and Richie <em>knows </em>Eddie, there and then, on sight.</p><p>It’s been happening in dribs and drabs all day, but now it’s like a dam bursting. The years rush back in; Richie is thirteen, pushing his bike over the bridge at sunset and watching the sunburnt flush of Eddie’s neck; he’s fifteen, reading a comic over Eddie’s shoulder, cross-legged on his bed and trying, somehow, to smell him; he’s seventeen, nervous and cold with a leeching lump of anxiety in his stomach, teetering on the toe-tip ledge of saying something, anything, as Eddie shoulders the last of his bags and packs his car for college. There are memories soaked in sunshine and stretched-out summer longing, and memories wintry with bitter sorrow and regret. There’s joy, then fear, then euphoria, then pain, then love, flashing back and forth like a spinning thaumatrope.</p><p>The smash of the gong surprises even himself. Richie clangs against it, his hands moving of their own accord, but it’s like everything else; Richie was never in control of anything, not his life, not the fucking clown, not his feelings for Eddie – not any of it. He was just a thread in the tapestry, a passenger, and the end of the journey is here: a last supper, and a final rendez-vous with death.</p><p>Richie watches Eddie from behind his windshield glasses. He looks at the way he talks, the way he laughs, the way he gets angry, the pull of emotions across his face in the red-glow light of the restaurant. He watches, and thinks about what he would do if he had more time.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>--- FIVE ---</em>
</p><p> </p><p>The fifth time is different because he hasn’t forgotten Eddie this time. This time, when he comes to, Eddie is crouching over him, haloed in blurred, hollow moonlight, and it’s only a surprise because Richie had thought for sure they were all going to die.</p><p>“I did it,” Eddie pants, and Richie’s hands go around Eddie’s ribs, feeling, wondering, holding. “I killed It.” And he laughs, a loud, triumphant <em>ha</em>, brimming with a vicious, hysterical victory.</p><p>Richie hasn’t forgotten, but there’s still <em>something</em>, he knows, that hasn’t quite fallen into place; a logic leap his brain had been making for him, a good old-fashioned trauma response where he’s locked away everything irrational and absurd and filled in the gaps with something cogent, the way a dream makes sense only when you’re dreaming it.</p><p>Eddie is looking down at him, present, <em>here, now</em>, and that's it, that's the moment when the fried ends of his sleeping neurons suddenly solder together, and he remembers; a missed connection on a train, a meet-cute over a magazine in a coffee shop, a tryst in a hotel room, and the knowledge that <em>all this time</em>—</p><p>Richie blinks and leans back. “It wasn’t a dream,” he says. He scrambles to sitting and grabs Eddie by the shoulders, and he grins, wide and wild, and his voice goes Old Hollywood, Kansas, Judy Garland. “<em>It wasn’t a dream!</em>” And he looks out to where Beverly’s standing, soaked head to toe in blood, next to Bill, Mike, Ben, Stan, all of them there, and he points at each of them in turn, “<em>You were there! And you, and you, and you!</em>”</p><p>“Okay, Dorothy,” Eddie says, and he has a funny look on his face, like everything hurts but he can’t stop smiling, and Richie laughs out loud and then starts to cry.</p><p>“You were <em>there</em>,” he says, again, and his tears are making clear tracks through the cosmic viscera sprayed all across his face, and he wants to get out of here, and he wants a shower so hot it’ll peel off the whole top layer and the last twenty-four hours, the last twenty-seven years, from his skin, and he wants to get into bed with Eddie and touch him everywhere, and he wants to be in love and <em>remember</em> it.</p><p>“I’m here now,” Eddie says, and Richie pulls him in and kisses him, hard and real, until the walls come down around them.</p><p>---</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>if you enjoyed, please feel free <a href="https://focusfixated.tumblr.com/post/624692557981564928/waiting-for-the-day-focusfixated-it-stephen">to reblog</a>, or come say hi <a href="https://focusfixated.tumblr.com">on tumblr</a>.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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